Photo: C. Duggan

I had always thought that I would be fantastic at voguing—I love to dance in clubs. That should be good training, right?— A couple years ago, I took a voguing workshop from master instructors Archie Burnett and Brahms “Bravo” LaFortune and thought: Finally, my moment has arrived. Each class culminated in the whole group striking a dozen poses facing enormous mirrors. Archie would shout categories like: BANJI, BODY BUILDER, COUTURE.

In the first days of the class, when Archie would yell, POSE, VOGUE, I would bring my lanky body to a punctuation at the precipice of poise. Inside myself, the affective reality of hitting those poses felt exactly like what I thought vogue was all about. I felt I was pronouncing my body’s raw glamorous being. My body asserted: STOP, LOOK, YES, THIS. I just can’t emphasize enough how right the intuitive approach felt.

I know a lot of people have the opposite instinct, but when I’m in a dance studio, I’m never compelled to look into the mirror. So it took me a while to bring my gaze into the echoing wall of reflections and realize I wasn’t really voguing the way the people who looked like they were voguing vogued. What I was doing looked more like pausing…

The poses that actually looked good—you know, those poses that were categorically appropriate to the dance form that we were learning—those poses felt burningly awkward, like a shoe on the wrong foot. I always jutted out my hips the wrong way relative to my shoulders— Damn you gendered embodiment, foiled again, I can’t believe it!— After a week, I had figured out how to make a couple acceptable approximations of voguing poses. They all were utterly unintuitive and alien, but they worked. Or they werqed. And they worked. They passed, barely.

Why did I assume that feeling of empowerment inside would correspond with the same external reading? Why would a relatively normative white man presume himself to be a natural at embodying a form defined by  queer, transgender Black and Latino dancers?

Early on, Camille A. Brown’s ensemble piece MR. TOL E. RAncE employs a snapshot choreographic technique somewhat comparable to vogue posing. I caught maybe half of these references: video vixens, gangsters, minstrel characterizations—moments somehow stemming from a popular media collective consciousness, or things we’ve seen on TV screens.

Act I is gloriously unendurable, flying through a boisterous arrangement of movement vocabulary culled from centuries of African American social dances (See: Buck, Wing and Jig, Thomas DeFrantz). In the course of a condensed, calorific quarter hour, the seven-strong ensemble dances breathtakingly hard. This was the strongest section of the performance for me, when incredibly talented and articulate performers saturate us with a mass of implications.

Ten minutes in, it’s humid in my shirt. Because I don’t know if I should be bobbing along to all the grand piano, stomping, clapping, hollering. My date isn’t bobbing. But she’s more political than I am. But is it better not to bob along? Is it more right of me as an audience member? These performers are clearly having fun, to a certain extent. This is fun, right? We’re all having fun together? But who is this for? Am I royalty here in this minstrel indulgence? Fuck. Or, conversely, have the performers taken ownership of me in our dynamic of captivation? Like it or not, I’m infected by a softly tapping toe, though its rhythm is set off by a conflicted resistance. This worrying ticklishness is good. I don’t know if we can assess the damage from our implication in racism without destabilizing the functional callus everyday self interest insists upon. This is something live performance can achieve, good.

I’m not convinced that the rest of the performance developed anything I didn’t get most forcefully in these first moments. I guess I found it sufficiently alarming to see those dancers hitting those poses to such great effect. I’m scared by the complicity my recognition entails, but also riven with the wonder of the live performer exceeding representation there in front of me. I’m watching for the cracks in the generalized subject of the instantly recognizable typecasts. I preferred how Maria Hassabi‘s SoloShow took up a  similar formal inquiry around body image representations. That performance has endured for me in large part because of its challenging use of extended duration. I am deeply suspicious of the entertaining clip and endlessly excellent musicality of MR. TOL E. RAncE, but the examined prejudice of my critical bent does nothing to discredit what is overall a powerfully resonate and vital work.

Andre Lepecki wrote a brilliant series of blog posts briefly critiquing semiotics in dance performance:

Let’s remember that communication theory presupposes the existence of several stable entities that must all be in place and functioning in order to guarantee the smooth transmission of something called “a message.” These stable entities are: an emitter, a signal, a channel, a code, and a receiver. For any successful communication to take place both emitter and receiver must share a code – this sharing is the only guarantee that a signal (pure abstract physical impulse) can be converted (or translated, or concretized) into a sign (a signal imbued with signification) expressing a meaning.

The question that’s most pressing to me is how the performs and Brown herself relate to the stability of their productive bodies (emitters in the framework above)? The legibility of these dancers oscillates wildly between the monstrously communicative assumption of an overly identified body—the inhuman efficacy of the symbol—and the excessive potentiality that bleeds ever beyond the superbody-cum-symbol. How that tremendous back and forth was steered in the overall composition of MR. TOL E. RAncE left me upset.

What feels half addressed is how this dance performance relates to the apparatus of entertainment it calls into question. The fact that the performance itself is relatively easy to attend to would seem to defang the critique it instigates. In the end, doesn’t it reenact the transgressions it laments? Are we to believe that the interior experience so defiled by these stereotypes is held in reverence through a marketable modern dance counterpoint? Personally, I really don’t know if we can articulate an effective critique of oppressive structures in a performative language complicit with proscenium entertainment. This is why the obstreperousness of the dim and screeching Miriam,by Nora Chipaumire, struck such a chord with me. What in MR. TOL E. RAncE’s movement vocabulary or tenor of composition ultimately doesn’t defer to the sovereignty of a sickly exploitive market of spectacle?

[Honestly, maybe it's there, and I just didn't see it. Feel free to comment.]

Yes, mainstream media presents archetypes we repeat, emulate, call into question, subvert. What’s left too undone for me is what this mainstream dance production’s strategic response is to the terribly reductive essentialism of entertainment.

-Robert Tyree

Broadly related:

1. Camille A. Brown and Dancers at the Joyce Theater - Gia Kourlas, NYTimes.com (2012)
2. Camille A. Brown & Andrea Miller at the Joyce Theatre, Jeremy M. Barker, Culturebot (2010)
3. Camille A. Brown’s gripping dance of racial stereotypes, Nim Wunnan, Oregon Arts Watch (2012)
4. Conversations Without Walls: Reflections on Some sweet day, Danielle Goldman, Judson Now (2012)
5. The Perfect Dance Critic, Miguel Gutierrez, Movement Research Performance Journal (2002)

MR. TOL E. RAncE was presented in Portland, Oregon December 6-8, 2012 by White Bird Dance

Trisha Brown in Watermotor (1978) Photo © Julieta Cervantes 2011

I took my seat for White Bird’s first show of the 2012-2013 Uncaged Series feeling quite the cynic—reluctantly as I really didn’t want to feel jaded about the Trisha Brown Dance Company, but despite myself as I’ve lost faith in major dance production.

The Newmark Theatre is an awkward dance venue for Portland. The seating has wonderful slope and sightlines, but those 1,200 square feet of stage and those 880 seats make it a gamble to stage dance on. That’s a whole lot of empty to bet against from a presenter’s point of view. It’s a dauntingly large venue to stage the challenging work I’m keen to advocate. The work that I have seen at the Newmark tends to go a bit too well with wine and leaves me too satiated to consider it vital.

Here’s what I’m walking in with.

I rarely see choreography that I care about. More often than not I’m forced to sedation by performance of controlled composure or turned off by dance pandering to a reductive psychological realism (WE ARE THE ROMANTIC BODIES SPEAKING DIRECTLY OF LOVE W/O WORDS! EMOTION! YOU! IDENTIFY! WITH!) -”a bunch of stuff.“

I have bad associations with “phrase work” or “count-based choreography.” It reads too much as product for me—cramming the potential of dance into the format of commodity. Of course, setting definite movement to counts (conventional choreography) allows an artist to construct ravishing moments. But even when I marvel along with everyone else at the spectacular dancing in something like, say Kidd Pivot or more recently Fluid Hug Hug, what I’m left with feels like a soda high—unsustainable and ultimately leaving me depressed and disembodied.

The kind of virtuosity that renders itself in take-away moments of spectacle disheartens me. It not only erases my kinesthetic agency by locating the performance entirely on stage—as opposed to between the stage and my relational body in the seat—but it purloins my belief in dance by making the form feel empty of integrity. Parading impressive feats on stage gets ticket sales and ovations, but I doesn’t get my respect.

Trisha Brown’s choreography is primarily count based and characteristically continuous; there’s no real hard stops. The program White Bird is presenting offers a fluent shorthand on Brown’s decades-deep body of dance work.

The show opens in 1978 with a master work of Judson-era postmodern dance: the seminal solo Watermotor, here performed by Leah Morrison. Then we’re in 2011 with Les Yeux et l’âme, and I’m braced for the worst. A giant, beautiful backdrop (Brown’s visual art), dancers in billowy, understated grey costumes, French baroque music: I didn’t like where this was going…

Five minutes into Les Yeux et l’âme and I’m wondering why someone like Brown—who has achieved mountains drawing our attention toward nuance—would now want to stage such grandiose and formal work. Was this new work smug? It certainly wasn’t the Man Walking Down the Side of the Building I fell in love with. I have a hard time approaching a piece like this because its style and overall demeanor seem complicit with so much of the commercial contemporary dance product that I disdain. Was this that? Could I still believe in the royalty of Brown?

Given a few more minutes, I melt to clay. My viewership telescoped into the grey staging. I didn’t care that my parents would have liked the costumes. I didn’t care how courtly formal or politely palatable the tone felt. I was bobbing in a verdant ecology of composition and performance. This was a choreographic voice I could believe and trust in, and on stage, a feast. I welled up a bit as a singular artistic logic opened through time and me.

All I can think to add to all the words that have been written about Trisha Brown is my immense appreciation for her integrity and artistry—which I saw in her company’s bead-like execution of all the loose wrists and carriages of momentum: an acutely considered parade of dance and an exquisitely crafted vision in movement.

My night at the Newmark returned some lost faith.

-Robert Tyree

Keith Hennessy/Circo Zero, “Turbulence (a dance about the economy)” at the 2012 Time-Based Art Festival, PICA. Photo: Joseph Webb, courtesy of Portland Institute for Contemporary Art.

PERFORMANCE CLUB: TBA:12 has hit the road, but Portland’s still here. Wanna watch the dust settle?

After 10 days waking up for the Time-Based Arts festival—bombing red lights on my bike to get less late for 10 a.m. workshops (or noon chats)—these past mornings have been sluggish. More heartbroken than hung-over, but admittedly a bit of both. Friend Nicole said it’s delirium. I said go feed your chickens.

Festivals concentrate contexts for expansion, nudging us into minor unions, new loves. Inside upended time, we boldly tamp down the stakes of faith, and when the stakes get pulled—when it’s Monday again (and again)—those holes become the nodes by which we leverage value and belief.

Speeches also concentrate contexts, so when Obama recently spoke of “unwavering hope grounded in unyielding struggle,” it was hard not to fall in love. Yet harder still to know the latter rather more intimately than the former—blankly hearing of an American Dream where if you work hard, you will be afforded a decent standard of living and dignity in your community.

Performing artists specialize in the production of immaterial links.

Hana Erdman’s “CONDITIONAL,” part of “Ten Tiny Dances” at 2012 Time-Based Art Festival, PICA. Photo: Chelsea Petrakis, courtesy of Portland Institute of Contemporary Art

When Hana Erdman—surrounded on a tiny stage by hundreds—links our empathy for a bewildered goat to a spectrum of consideration-to-sexualization for her own body…

When Keith Hennnessy and Circo Zero’s Turbulence (a dance about the economy) links an exhausting human pyramid, torture at Abu Ghraib and gold sequins…

When Laurie Anderson’s Dirtday! links raising pigs on platforms—sidestepping prohibitions against pigs on Israeli soil—to indefinitely detaining those labeled “terrorists” by the U.S. government (powers granted in the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act)...

When Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol’s El Rumor del Incendio links our willingness in attending an intricate, insistent plot to a history widely unrecognized not only outside but also within Mexico…

When Biljana Kosmogina’s P Campaign links the emotional manipulation of political theater to our desire for a democracy of neatly identifiable, consistent platforms—as well as a considerable absence of substantive message…

Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol, “El Rumor del Incendio” at the 2012 Time-Based Art Festival, PICA. Photo by Kate Holly, courtesy of Portland Institute for Contemporary Art.

…the immaterial production of this labor—the links in consideration such performance generates—warrants investment not only as a means of diversification (hedging our civic portfolio against collapse and growing innovation in decentralized diplomacy) but as a means of adding value, mobility and body to the life of beliefs. When we stop getting together around time-based art, when the festival ends, I get inside fever, bad—but in good company. In the week since TBA:12 closed, Portland friends have declared themselves “broken” and “rather undone.”

More immediately than the specious, “fundamental American promise that, even if you don’t start out with much, if you work hard and do what you’re supposed to do, then you should be able to build a decent life for yourself,” the promise I need today is that this past week’s severance will be proven false—that this phantom currency beyond our balance will be made the real wealth of tomorrow’s exchanges. And these immaterial links produced around performance will through us find their longevity and structural integrity: bridges of practice between where we are and where we strive to be.

-Robert Tyree | September 2012 | Originally published through Claudia La Rocco’s Performance Club

TBA:12′s Beer Garden at The Works/Washington High School. Photo: Wayne Bund courtesy of Portland Institute for Contemporary Art

PERFORMANCE CLUB: For 10 days each of the last 10 Septembers, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s Time-Based Arts Festival has run rampant in a city often peripheral to considerations of contemporary performance.

TBA’s two nonstop 90-hour weeks draw a lot of committed people to get haggard and timely together; a break in Portland’s avowedly low-key tendencies. For me, what’s overwhelming is not the intensity of working the festival, but the scale and scope of ideas and power dynamics―mingling or not―roiling our fair city’s fresh air. By Oregon standards, the breadth of artistic vision walking the streets is obscene.

I asked Miguel Gutierrez if TBA made Portland into a kind of Aspen. He said no. But I keep fighting the impression that this festival is more important for visitors than it is for the city’s 600,000 residents.

Over the last 10 years, PICA has built TBA into a key stomping ground for big player curators, booking agents and arts administrators. This past week, there have been a lot of empty offices in cultural capitals from San Francisco to New York City and beyond. In fair exchange, Angela Mattox’s office has been empty for dozens of job-related sojourns since she accepted PICA’s newly reinvented position of permanent artistic director roughly a year ago―a return to founder Kristy Edmunds’ pre-2001 model, before the institute began inviting guest artistic directors to curate festivals in three-year appointments. (Mark Russell and Cathy Edwards guided PICA through six years of time-based art while living on the East Coast)

Why the return? PICA now seems determined to buck a problematic reputation for being out of touch with the communities it purports to serve. Opening TBA:12 with a newly commissioned work that both employed and portrayed the diversity of Portland’s populace felt like a key gesture beyond the art core, an inclusive if abrasive invitation by way of hot mics and pushy sequencing. Big Art Group’s The People-Portland was a monumental and unavoidable piece, spurring the flurries of dialogue that can make or break the expanded engagement sought by a confidently reorienting PICA.

Big Art Group’s “The People — Portland.” Photo: Joseph Webb courtesy of Portland Institute for Contemporary Art.

I moved to Portland from Seattle via France and South Africa. Trying to go abroad and “figure it all out” made me need to return and center my life around dance. Portland’s low cost of living and creative hum seemed a good place to get my feet wet. My first months here, I stumbled onto TBA:08―the final year of Russell’s programming and the midpoint in the former model of rotating curation. The festival has since exposed me to people, ideas and work that have been essential to my development as an artist―and more broadly as a person in the world. I’m a TBA believer, but I’ve always lived here with a very particular intention.

I moved to Portland with no dance resumé. Four years later, I’m calling myself achoreographer  on my passport renewal. I do contemporary dance, developing work all year in a city that, for 11 months out of that year, often feels outside of and irrelevant to international conversations about contemporary performance. 

In April, PICA opened the doors of its new offices on an attractive block downtown, next door to the Ace Hotel, that iconic tourist funnel. The elevator is ungodly slow, but the top floor is only three stories up. Curated by Kristan Kennedy, roughly a third of TBA:12′s visual art program is installed in the versatile new headquarters. The fresh public space has rebuilt some of the enthusiasm lost around 2004 when PICA made a definitive reduction in its visual arts program to consolidate resources around TBA’s performance program, “burning a majority of bridges with the visual arts community.”The new office space is hugely more inviting and airy than the intimidating corner that the advertising colossus (and colossal PICA supporter) Wieden+Kennedy had been comping the institution since 2000.

I first met Cathy Edwards in that power den. I was smitten with how deftly she handled questions during a TBA:09 preview of Meg Stuart, an artist new to me. This curator from New York City―wow―she spoke so pro. I had never encountered that level of dialogue around dance, certainly not so elegantly conveyed. It made an impact more than an impression.

I found out that Angela Mattox was to be the new artistic director of PICA while in Vienna for  ImPulzTanz and danceWEB last year. I didn’t know if this was news or not in the context of Europe’s ultra grand contemporary dance festival. I made a vacant mention of the PICA announcement to Trajal Harrell [or did he bring it up to me?] Yes, he had heard. And yes it was a big move for PICA. A lot of people far, far away from Portland got the memo of PICA’s big moves.

This is the first year I’ve ever known PICA to have an artistic director who has both curated for and lived in Portland year round―someone who I can invite to my performances (huge) or chat with while bringing a friend to an exhibit. I’ve always considered the resident PICA staff personable, but from the get go Mattox has worked the approachability game like a champ, major league and multi-ring. The appealing offices/exhibition space/resource room coupled with Mattox’s readiness to talk and listen make real PICA’s overhauled approach to its presence in Portland.

They even used their space for a rave (derivative dance party) to celebrate PICA’s 17th birthday.

And yet …as I bike the bridges and haunt the beer garden these long festival days, I keep wondering how sympathetic our city is to Mattox’s conviction in the festival program: “I believe it is imperative that Portland engage in an international artistic and cultural conversation.” Again, in an interview on a rad community radio station: ”It’s the thing that I’m most passionate about. I really feel like it’s imperative for arts organizations like PICA to really take a stand on that and to bring in amazing global work, to make sure that Portland really is in dialogue―artistically, culturally, politically―with what’s going on around the world.”

I got a little drunk meeting with Mattox on the eve of the festival. She is one of the most unassumingly sharp, articulate and convivial people I’ve ever spoken with―so I drank beer to keep focused? We talked for a couple hours―which seems like a crazy amount of time to sacrifice just before her festival debut. It must have been a conversation we were both deeply invested in building―either that, or Mattox is even better at working the crowd than I’ve given her credit for. Excusing myself for a moment, I handed her my notebook to see if any unspoken ideas stood out. In a note to myself I had written: “Easy to isolate and covet things abroad. What are those things?” I thought of this in terms of envy for what other cities’ art festivals have been able to pull off, and my example was the festival lounge at ImPulzTanz, where music, dancing and drinks go until dawn night after night (Oregon has tyrannically conservative state liquor control laws). Since Mattox has been to countless festivals during her career, I was curious to hear of other instances comparable to my Viennese disco, which one could isolate and covet. But when I got back to our table, she had written a concern I wasn’t thinking of when I had written down that question: “exoticization of the global.”

Reading local press and talking to festival goers, I sometimes worry that Portland audiences might not be willing to grapple with the substantial difference at the heart of intercultural engagement. I hate to use a term like ethnocentrism, but I hate a lot of things even more.  Portland’s art core may be too happy with happy hours and its famed coolness to actually live the necessity of what the city declares itself to be: committed to advancing equity among diverse communities (see: Portland Plan). Too much criticism―both formally published and informally distributed in conversation or online―flirts with xenophobia in thinly-veiled vernacular. It’s a common unconscious complacency. And it’s the kind of invisible disavowal that at the same time threatens and makes indispensable international contemporary arts programming.

TBA:12 is drawn from nuanced heritages in Mexico, Japan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zimbabwe, Croatia, France and New York, not to mention among art forms in and of themselves. The program’s daily noontime chats with visiting artists, as well as academic contextualizing of Latin American theater, have proposed bridges of insight. Still, during these first days of September, too many have denied even modest deference to visiting artists’ cultural contexts.Too many have assumed the values we carry into our seats from familiar streets are complete and that all performance ought abide by them.

One example that’s particularly revealing concerns Miriam, a performance by NYC-based, Zimbabwe-born Nora Chipaumire. This piece had its world premiere here at TBA:12. Chipaumire and co-performer Okwui Okpokwasili offered two nights of challenging, dark, brave and exquisite performance. At her noontime chat, I made a little star in my notes: “Africa is a place that creates ideas and pushes trends.” We so often unknowingly evaluate and compare work to that of western Europe’s industrial performance complex, but this work does not need to be compared to dominate models of major performance. Chipaumire insists, “It is what it is and it is worthy.” I asked how her sense of embodiment felt inside the work―as it was designed for the round but presented here in a proscenium staging. Her response: She must conquer the proscenium, overwrite its colonial history and drag the audience’s perspective up onto the stage with her, around a defiant spatial composition and light design that acknowledges “dark is a color.” That gave me goosebumps.

Nora Chipaumire’s “Miriam.” Photo: Jonah Levine courtesy of Portland Institute for Contemporary Art.

It’s been disheartening then to hear Miriam again and again referred to as “too dimly lit” or “too dark.” How is a deeply considered choice by a devoted artist disdained as a choice you could make better?! How can you not understand that kind of judgment to be grossly condescending?! It’s been infuriating to read statements like the following passing as authoritative criticism in local press:

“But too often ― at TBA but also in plenty of other places ― artists ponder an issue really hard and wind up creating obscure but inspired connections among ideas and emotions in their heads, yet lack the craft or inclination to elucidate (non-didactically) those connections to audiences who don’t share the references.”

Engagement with time-based art is a civic practice that reflects civic character.

To say an artist’s work fails because that work lacks a style of craft or inclinations that abide by your expectations conveys a deep erasure of difference incompatible with the intercultural competencies demanded of good people living together in the 21st century. I protest criticism that derives rhetorical authority from slamming the door on multiplicity. More philosophically, I reject language that negates performance’s potential to harbor elements that may be hidden to perception, yet are nonetheless appreciable if we remain open to the subtleties of sensation. That front line of sensation needs our advocacy. It is where connection germinates, and it is unethical to oppress its productive potentiality by impositions of “common sense.”

I’ll thank Ron Berry, of Austin’s Fusebox festival, for letting me echo his statement during the Why Festivals? panel : “I feel in Austin, the public conversation is often an inadequate and uninteresting one. And I think there needs to be some real rethinking about how we engage as a community around the work and how we talk about it in a way that’s more meaningful. Some of this is just economics. In the newspapers, it’s often just a review and the real estate for that review has gotten shorter and shorter, and it’s typically a plot synopsis and then whether you liked it or not. And I don’t really care if this person liked it or not. It’s an uninteresting conversation. It’s a model built around consumption and not a model of engagement. And that’s a really important distinction.”

The public I so want to believe in―the one which would support Mattox’s imperative that PICA pursue local impact from a global perspective―practices being a corpus of audience-citizens tolerant of ambiguity and humble in the face of perspectives diagonal to their own. In this audience, we accept the virtue in nonrecognition and, alternately, lean toward a heroic unsettling of one’s position of discernment, discovering rather than disappearing difference. (Thank you Keith Hennessy for guiding me to “disappearing difference.”)

This past week, Guttierez likened performances with ambiguous elements to “endangered owls.” That’s an angle that’s gotta play well in eco-friendly Portland, and one we’ll encounter soon again as PICA places And lose the name of action into a cornerstone slot of TBA:13.

In June, a PICA symposium set a promising precedent of affordable (the $5 meal included drinks!), multi-modal context building. Bodies, Identities, and Alternative Economies framed (and helped developed) Keith Hennessy/Ciro Zero’s Turbulence: a dance about the economy months before the TBA:12 world premiere on September 11th. Apparently, such non-September programming is a sign of things to come, although Mattox assures us that it may take an entirely different form from June’s intensive weekend.

From people I love and/or respect, I’ve heard audiences at TBA described as “curious” and “enthusiastic”―with an exceptional range of ages sharing the seats, sharing space and time together―and, I hope, sharing considerations. Given their achievements in so many other progressive pursuits, Portlanders can surely hold themselves to higher standards of intentional discourse to counter the culture of callous impatience that threatens diversity in its myriad dialogues. Engagement with time-based art is a beginning. Navigating social futures through active practices—reaching for higher ground—let’s say that’s its never-ending end.

-Robert Tyree | September 2012 | Originally published through Claudia La Rocco’s Performance Club

Backstage at On the Boards, the other artists in the first weekend Studio Showcase of the Northwest New Works Festival were playing word games I could never figure out – something involving a lot of guesses and maybe a bus. What’s “crotch” in French? I think they settled on “entrecuisse”.

I couldn’t join in, which bummed me out. In four minutes I had to be super committed to dragging an important piece of cardboard across the stage. Instead of gaming, I stood next to my corrugated burden in the blue wings, trying to keep my body warm, my feet limber, trying to do push ups and hop around without falling into view of the pre-show audience. 

Over the course of our three-night run, I spent a cool hour cramped in that dim wing while the theatre filled with audience. Despite the anxiety, it was lovely. Prior to the Northwest New Works Festival (NWNW), I had performed five other in-development versions of Tahni Holt‘s Sunshine. All five were one-time performances, which I always find hard to gauge. You work for months, and then it’s done. Through our NWNW performances, I finally felt acquainted with Sunshine in a room. A room whose particular qualities grew into the work a little more each night: the slide of the floor, the carriage of light and sound, the relationship with audience our closeness allowed.

Done performing our 20-minute world, I washed my feet and became audience for the festival’s 16 other new works. A week later, I caught something of a sister program of 7 works in Portland’s Risk/Reward Festival.

29 years running, the Northwest New Works Festival at Seattle’s On the Boards Theatre presents a statement definitive of contemporary performance from the Pacific Northwest. From Portland, Hand2Mouth‘s Risk/Reward Festival (R/R), now in its 5th year, has developed a close and promising partnership with their northern colleagues. Arguably, these festivals present our region’s finest – a region flattered by an enduringly attractive reputation and host to two vibrant cities about as far away from one another as Brussels is to Paris.

As I watched the 2012 NWNW and R/R programs, I kept asking the obvious question: What characterizes contemporary performance in the Pacific Northwest? What would I think of this work if I saw it out of context, if I didn’t know any of the artists involved?

Much of the work in these festivals is not intended to be complete, but rather a stage in the development of a piece that will presumably be produced in full in the near future. Hopefully so, but  doubts hung over many of the performances I saw.

Will there be a full staging? Will there be so healthy an audience for a stand-alone work? Will this work ever be performed outside the Pacific Northwest? Will this work ever be performed again at all?

What I saw playing out most prominently on the stages in Seattle and Portland was a brutal and uncomfortable tension between the commitment of the performers on one hand and on the other the specter that: maybe this is it. Maybe this is the complete lifespan and audience of the work, or -more accurately- the death of the work in its completion.

As far as I can tell, it seems that roughly half of the pieces in this year’s festivals have indeed secured their next phase of production. Just from studying the program, we know Tahni Holt, Ulrich/Graczyk/Baldoz and Hand2Mouth will premier full length works in the coming year.

However, those programs also contain sentiments that lay bear an uncertainty all too familiar to regional performing artists:

“Bolero is part of an evening-length work (in development), entitled either My Moon Time or Waxie Moon in a Doll’s House. Look for it somewhere, someday. Interested producers, please email waxie.moon@gmail.com.”

The produce I am always looking to harvest from contemporary performance is the disruptive tip beyond recognition that forces us into an interface with sensation so compelling that we must invent language of commune, producing uniquely progressive cultural dialogues. It’s encouraging then to read in Sean Ryan’s program notes as NWNW festival director, “Over the past 29 years, audiences have been able to see regional artists of all genres constantly defying definition and observe first-hand how they have helped shape the artistic ecology of our community.”

While I agree with much of what each festival’s director writes in their respective program’s opening letters, I draw issue with each of their foundational first sentences.

I would argue that presenting regional works in their city of development for largely local audiences without also advocating for opportunities to circulate those works through venues in cities beyond their point of origin has a perverse effect on the “development”, “advancement” and “proliferation” of contemporary performance.

Of course, the opportunity to perform new work nourishes and sustains our local arts practitioners. I am always inspired to create when I see the accomplishments of peer artists and any performance opportunity structures the creative process in an essential way. I want to believe so badly that the Pacific Northwest’s tone of alternative can find a substantial voice in contemporary performance, but damn if it isn’t a thin line between “regional” and “parochial”.

Our performance scene can feel troublingly inward oriented. Little wonder that when audiences for regional work are consistently made up of our own community and kin, works run the risk of becoming inbred. The majority of contemporary performance work from Seattle and Portland is rarely performed outside it’s generative locales. These conditions of production too readily allow artists to subsidize their work with their personalities. A performance that operates through any proportion of personal affection between the its creators and audience seems shaky in its footing.

In OtB’s conversation-conducive lobby, Seattle’s Amy O’Neal brought up the topic of post-show talkbacks and how frank and insightful the discussion was after a recent showing of her work in Memphis. Not knowing her as a person, the audience could only speak to their experience of the visitor’s work. Apparently speak they did, and openly. During a symposium presented by PICA this past weekend, San-Francisco’s Keith Hennessy insisted that the most useful feedback for him as a visiting choreographer came from total strangers who attended open rehearsals of his latest work-in-progress.

An audience that is unconditionally supportive is worthless when it comes to shoring up the functional integrity of performance. It’s so hard to separate the work from the worker, yet so necessary to approach the anonymity of enduring live performance. Lacking the stimulus of a mature infrastructure to circulate work,  the Pacific Northwest will always fall short of pro standards in the development of contemporary performance.

Please, feel free to disagree. These are pointed, sweeping and problematic statements coming out in an authoritative voice that even grosses me out. I’m still a newbie, and I could imagine dozens of voices that could school me on this. Perhaps it’s just pessimism.

-A tree falling in the woods with only trees to bear witness?

-Or a tree falling in the woods with trees bearing witness?

To what extent does a performance live if it’s only seen by audiences in the region where it was produced? The difference between a performance getting stoned in its parents’ basement and a performance innovating something daunting in its garage is the prospect of impact. I’d argue that the biggest obstacle we face is not one of talent but of circulation.

The deeply critical project of the Pacific Northwest (or even Cascadia), sustains a posture toward contemporary culture that is relevant to the broadest artistic discourses. The work produced here can access and portray the dynamics defining our times through uniquely perceptive lenses. Ours could be a vital contribution to a field that can only benefit from a more problematic heterogeneity in its players. But I don’t see our performances making the same caliber of contribution that other forms from our region already have made without a reassessment and retooling of our system of distribution.

“What artist would not want to live in the Pacific Northwest?”

Last summer, I had an incredible opportunity to realistically assess a prospect that a vast number of US-based artists grapple with: Should I stay or should I go (to Europe)? Immersed in a major international dance festival, Vienna’s ImPulzTanz, years of my grass-is-greener wondering got every variety of reality check I could have hoped for.

In Vienna, I made it a point to talk pragmatics with formerly US-based artists pursuing the European dream. After watching his well-received performance, Zombie Aporia, as part of the festival’s emerging artists series, I spoke with Daniel Linehan about his move to Brussels along with Michael Helland; both were former classmates at the University of Washington. In brief, I got the impression that many US artists move abroad because they are sick of working all year to develop a piece, performing it one weekend, and then starting all over again with the hope that their next endeavor might live longer than its gestation. This stillborn reality faces performance producers all across the United States.

During a coffee break, another Brussels-based choreographer and performer Ivo Dimchev asked about my decision to live in Portland – a choice that is understandably baffling to anyone making work for European performance markets. After conveying within a state-or-two’s accuracy where Portland was located on a map (not that I could pinpoint Dimchev’s former home of Sofia), I laid out my rationale: the low cost of living allows me to focus on developing my dance practice, I enjoy the personable scale of my community, and I belief work made outside major markets can be as good or better than work produced in Europe’s cultural capitals. His response was something like: Sure, that’s fine to have comfortable conditions of production, but if you are so far from the market, how is anyone ever going to see your work?

We were just finishing a workshop in which Dimchev had (lightly) directed us through a one-week condensation of the process he used to generate Som Faves, one of his seminal solo performances that’s been devoured by European contemporary performance markets keen to program “outsider” work. “I’m excited to see your work,” I said. “It’s boring,” he replied. He’s performed Som Faves hundreds of time in dozens of cities. The night I saw it was beyond sold out, and captivating. Foremost, he’s an exceptional creator and performer, though it’s integral that his career emerged from a region outside the dominant Western European industrial performance complex – a region with a distinctive cultural heritage and history – a handful of cities connected by a couple hours’ drive – woefully lacking in the administrative infrastructure to support the creation and circulation of contemporary performance: The Balkans!

Let’s just say Dimchev’s take on Portland came from a perspective of insight.

Striking a different tone, he also told me about a performance he saw “some small place in South Carolina” that was so strange and bizarre that, well, he seemed to have really admired it.

That’s the sentiment that keeps me going.

I want to believe in the produce of minor markets, and what seems most detrimental to the development of performance in the Pacific Northwest is the lack of presenting opportunities beyond our region.

Consider how the dynamics of contemporary performance production might change if there were as many viable opportunities to circulate work as there were to perform it locally.

Would the mission of regional festivals to champion and advance new performance be more roundly served if presenters in, for instance, Seattle, Portland and San Francisco partnered to enable a few of the pieces in next year’s festivals to tour all three cities?

To a limited degree, this is already occurring in the programming of the NWNW and R/R festivals. We can also study SCUBA‘s existing model of a national touring network for dance, which connects Seattle, San Francisco, Philadelphia and Minneapolis. My brief discussions with this year’s Seattle SCUBA artists, Alice Gosti/Spaghetii Co. and Allie Hankins, indicated what you might expect: the opportunity to present their work outside Seattle is having a deeply positive effect on their artistic practice. Alternately, I’ve found the work of the Nomad Dance Academy deeply inspiring and far more concerted than our region’s comparably modest attempts to create conditions for the “professionalization” of contemporary dance.

I’m aware that these are contentious points. I’ve done my best to address complex issues in a compact but coherent critique. There’s so much more to be said, examined and considered. This is a very market normative line of thought, yet much of what excites me most in our region’s performances seems to come from a place where the idea of a market doesn’t even play a role.  In the end, I’ll stand behind the argument that presenting works of contemporary performance to audiences beyond the work’s site of production can efficiently condense and clarify those works’ operation, returning home a virtuous cycle of bar raising and  possibly inspiring other local creators to go after the same opportunities to make newly viable contributions to a broader artistic discourse. To that effect, I’m presently pitching the proposal below. I welcome your opinions, objections, comments and ideas.

///

MINOR FLANK is a series of publicly-participatory dances to dance music and associated educational, artistic and advocacy programming designed to establish an indie performance market by generating alternative contemporary performance circuits between cities in sister regions of the Pacific Northwest and Southeastern USA over a period of approximately one year.

Minor Flank aspires to create minor market conditions by allowing artists the opportunity to tour performance work along its two regional three-city circuits. This not only connects contemporaries in different cities across geographical regions that have the potential for relatively pragmatic collaborative work, but also provides the incentive to develop performance that will be performed for more than the one-weekend run so terribly typical of contemporary performance productions in the USA. The works that develop from these minor markets may be attractive to major markets in Europe and North America (NYC, Montreal).

///

Earlier in the day -before The Göteborg Ballet’s All-Nordic Program- my academic director told me I looked like a Russian sailor. Making great use of office flattery, he added, “It’s a good spring look.”

That was nice of him.

Honestly, I had thought about my sweater a lot that day. I often buy sweaters at H&M so I can pull off my day job rendition of a hip-but-together English teacher. I’ve always hoped the sweater I wore that day -for both work and The Göteborg Ballet- would come off as edgy. Solid white from the neckline to mid-chest with stark blue horizontal stripes all the way down to the bottom seam = bold + cool.

After seven hour’s teaching, I was checking my look in the library’s bathroom mirror, thinking about the Russian sailor comment, thinking of my desperate hope for this sweater’s versatility, thinking of the conference room where H&M designers sat around strategizing over my sweater.

Those smug bastards, sitting in a room tailoring this sweater to appeal to me. Looking at pictures of Russian sailors and debating the question: “How can we make a sweater that sells an aura of the ruggedly romantic seaman to a guy bathed in non-offensive house pop at Pioneer Place Mall?”

Let’s decode the appellation of The Göteborg Ballet a bit. The term “ballet” is used in a sense more common to European dance production, where state-funded “operas” are venues for various concert arts. Sweden’s GöteborgsOperan presents works in following categories: Opera, Dance, Musical, Concert. Although it’s at first a bit of a paradox in our use of the terms, it’s understandable that The Göteborg Ballet describes itself as a contemporary dance company.

A SWEDISH FRIEND SAYS:

The three choreographers Kenneth Kvartström, Örjan Andersson and Johan Inger are all very big names in Sweden, but only in Sweden. Sweden is still very conservative, and there is not much infrastructure between independent makers. The Göteborg ballet is a big conventional venue, an opera. My mother goes there. They seem to renew well, and they have a large audience, but all in conventional frames of its hipness let’s say. I would say that the Göteborg ballet is much more interesting than the Stockholm one. These are conventional establishments that get very much funding from the government. I don’t spend so much time there! I go to the Göteborg ballet with my mother, and once I was there with my high school class.//

THE OPERA’S WEBSITE SAYS:

That’s nice of them.

One of the pieces in the All-Nordic Program registered with me. The other two did not. Friends I saw the show with had an almost completely opposite experience and preferences than my own.

For your critic, two pieces were anemic, and if they aspire to “show future generations what values we used to have, what conflicts we used to deal with, and what we dreamed of,” their portrayals might each be reduced to: this is what market forces squeeze out of choreographers and producers; look how the market moves tirelessly trained dancer bodies season after season. 

In all three pieces, I saw the same generic kneel-and-pivot. At times, all that I saw was marketable Euro-dance product. Over the course of one piece, I greatly admired one choreographer’s deeply nuanced voice as conveyed in the performance of bodies rich of character and spirit.

No matter which piece I liked or didn’t, I hope Portland audiences find their own posture toward each work’s integrity or lack thereof. White Bird presents the program through Saturday at the Newmark Theatre – here for info.

A NORWEGIAN FRIEND SAYS:

I think dance and theatre institutions here in Scandinavia have kind of the same role, since the national thinking of art-using-department-money-systems in Norway and Sweden are very similar, both in dance and theatre and stage art in general. Oh, I have so many thoughts about this, that go into political issues about how we spend the money here in Scandinavia, in a hierarchical system that isn’t always for the best of the art being produced. I think that the Göteborg Opera, like many other big institutions (as far as I know they are supported by the state of Sweden and the community of Göteborg in mainpart?) are being swallowed by a system that eats too much/a lots of money in the name of leading/administration/holding the system itself alive, rather than using money on what art is actually made or which artists want to make. Maybe the system makes the possibilities smaller. BUT – i don´t know the system of Göteborg Opera very well, so I am also possibly completely wrong.

At the same time, Göteborg has this festival, Göteborgs Dans & Teater Festival, which I think is an important happening in Scandinavia, bringing international companies/performances to small Göteborg in Sweden. Which also maybe tells something of this city, which maybe generates something in it’s Ballet, or maybe the other way around. I haven’t heard so much about the Ballet, that is why I’m so general in how I speak, but I know dancers I respect have gone to auditions there, which I would say is a positive sign.//

My favorite sweater, by the way, is one I got from a little store in Montréal. It cost ten times as much as my H&M sweater, but it was worth it. It’s one-of-its kind, woven together from parts of half-a-dozen vintage sweaters. You will never own this sweater. And I will never wash it.

-Robert Tyree | April 2012

LOVE FIRE immediately declares how it intends to relate to its audience: brashly. There’s a man, a woman, a greatest hits collection of classical waltz music and a title I can’t read without a smirk.

waltz – What does it make you think of? Probably something vaguely historic.

There’s most likely traditional male and female roles, a clear lead-and-follow dynamic. Not the most holistic portrayal of the way we live relationships today.

On the other hand, if you’ve experienced waltz on the movement or musical side of things, the term might also make you think of a waltz’s characteristically catchy rhythm

-/ down up up / down up up /-

The vigorous peasant dancer, following an instinctive knowledge of the weight of fall, utilizes his surplus energy to press all his strength into the proper beat of the measure, thus intensifying his personal enjoyment in dancing.

-Approximately attributable to early waltz forms in 16th century Europe. Thank you, Wikipedia.

One way to watch Love Fire is as a series of blown out waltzes without the buttoned-up precept that an active man leads a passive woman through an orderly public becoming in grace. Classic musical structures remain behind this alien premise, propelling Love Fire‘s waltzes through an often syncopated foray into juicy pandemonium. Waltz’s suspensions and glides are all there, but boy are they endearingly freakish and meticulously inventive.

Randomly select a show from a given week’s dance listings here in Portland, and I’ll be damned if at least half the show doesn’t consist of two compositional conventions: limbs making clear lines and bodies moving in unison.

Love Fire contains almost no unison between its two dancers, and once I started watching for it, the only clear line I caught had gone as soon as it appeared. Not only that, that long leg line was -wait for it- oriented straight toward the audience, rendering it nearly unappreciable.

I found this deeply refreshing. Some will find it unbearable. In fact, Love Fire is the boldest production I’ve ever seen White Bird present. Shoot, it would be daring in PICA’s TBA programming, much less as part of the ostensibly risky Uncaged series. The opening night audience felt a bit the deer in the headlights at times, but for the most part, reactions from the audience revealed that Love Fire registered on many wavelengths, be they humored or offended.The dancers glow character – passionate pathos. Choreographer and performer Yasmeen Godder and her counterpart Matan Zamir whip through exquisite, evocative postures. When the movement resolves, we encounter bodies poised anywhere from a bit off to a lot off. Imaginative poses like this could intrigue me for days.

The performance operates most overtly through melodrama that slides from raunchy to manic, ecstatic to emphatic. But for all of Love Fire‘s abandon, the dance stays on track through an unerring commitment to articulating distinct relationships between the two dancers on stage. If you took a picture every 10 seconds, you’d be able to fill in a comic bubble speculating on the psychological drive of each performer with some degree of certainly in 3/4 of the images.

What distinguished Godder’s work for me were numerous shifts which instantly reoriented what I thought I was observing. Watch for the moments when all tends blue and then a sharp movement lands the same moment yellow, and sticks that shift. These transformations are built deep into the piece, and each time one unfolded, I had to run blindly to catch up with where it was headed. Those are thrilling moments that the performers achieve marvelously.

-Robert Tyree | March 2012

You’d have to be in a really bad mood not to have a good time at Dark Matters, Crystal Pite’s widely-toured work for her Kidd Pivot company. It’s entertaining, spectacular and deftly constructed. The first hour flies by and flings you into intermission, while the second act plays with aspects of performance distinct from the first. It’s an astute way to compose 120 minutes. Everybody gets some, appealing to diverse desires and tastes without denying or exhausting audience members with different agendas.

Audiences who like that kind of thing can talk about the spatial and temporal traits of the ensemble choreography. Others can talk about what it all means, unpacking interpretations of the narrative that neatly bookends the work but which is also arguably absent for much of it. The official site says: “The revelations of Act One inform the way we view the dancing in Act Two.” 

They might! You tell me.

MY NOTES: What?! I could have sworn this was a Pixar proof of concept. The set/costume design eerily materialize what I imagined when reading Kafka’s Metamorphosis or Sartre’s No Exit. Couple that with sequences straight out of video games! (and movies derived from video games): Mortal Kombat – Street Fighter – The Matrix – Kung Fu Panda – Zelda: Twilight Princess. This would totally work with teen audiences. Gee-whizz moments, even when borderline gimmicky, make me feel like a kid in a good way.

I’m deeply invested in dance making, so I have a very particular agenda as a viewer. From my seat, the narrative-driven sections worked as charismatic theatre, the light design and the relation of dancers to sets and costumes was wow-inducing, and I appreciated how the work stayed well shy of saccharine. I was impressed by the generous amount of peak spectacle Dark Matters managed to achieve through sheer craft and composition.

 One oft-repeated technique places a phrase of slickly disassociated movement over an abstractly muscular soundscape so as to build the kind of humid counterpoint that a quick snap to punctuated syncopation can cut like a warm day in winter. Varying tastes will find the frequent use of such neat trickery awesome or excessive. 

Personally, I’d see the show again just to watch Jermaine Maurice Spivey, whose majestically possessed lead on tempo was inspiring to behold. Sandra Marin Garcia also delivered a riveting finale hollowed of sentimentality but loaded with emotive abandon. 

Dark Matter is starting on it’s third year of touring. It felt thoroughly dialed in, perhaps a bit more than I typically appreciate. This made the moments where the dancers achieved exceptional performativity all the more admirable and rewarding. It will be interesting to see how it contrasts to the final performance in this season’s Uncaged Series: Yasmeen Godder’s Love Fire (March 29-31). Love Fire will be making its North American premier here in Portland, and I look forward to seeing these two more or less back to back.

-Robert Tyree | March 2012

15-20% of the audience walked out of a dance performance I was at recently. We were in a theatre with no back exit and a stage that ran level with the front row – like Portland’s Imago Theatre. Each person that left had to walk past everyone else in the audience and cross a couple feet downstage of the performers.

I gave the show a standing ovation, feeling like I was the hero of some fantasy Norman Rockwell painting.

I was part of an audience full of artists deeply invested in performance making – opinionated as all hell. Or, at least I was in the audience with them early on in the performance.

Afterwards, we fought about the piece as if daily economic calamity, war, poverty or any number of other crises ceased to exist. Fighting over this one performance was of central importance. And the best/only way we could make any difference in the word was wrapped up in that immediate battle over art.

I knew we would argue like this, so wrote down all the things I admired about the performance. I anticipated how the haters would hate so as to readily refute their bogus claims. It got heated. It forced us to show what cards we were holding, where our values and allegiances aligned and where they recoiled.

Their critiques revealed that they weren’t seeing the same performance I was seeing. It offended me that they would see simplicity where I saw intricacy. It was like they said all __(insert ethnicity)__people looked alike. And it made me fear for a future blunt of perception.

Whenever I hate a performance, I love to hear others explain what they appreciated about it.

No one worth talking to will begrudge you your values; even though they may test them with flabbergasting insistence.

Krystal South wrote a thoughtful and smart post well worth reading entitled “Potential Risk of Failure“. I appreciate her points even if the potential risk of failure didn’t feel so palpable to me during the majority of TBA:11′s performances.

Part of this boils down to the fact that most performances that are presented in TBA are already dialed in by national and international tours prior to their presentation in Portland. Consider how the human factor differentiates visual and live time-based arts. Imagine crafting a performance for a period of time (several piece at TBA:11 took years to develop) and then premiering the piece, and then performing the piece in a number of cities over the course of a year or longer, and then coming to Portland, Oregon.

How is the premier different from the performance that occurs a year later? How does a performance differ in the second city it tours to compared to the third? Can work fail if it’s already been deemed laudable by other cities’ critics, festivals and audiences?

Kyle Abraham/Abraham.In.Motion premiered Radio Show in Pittsburgh in January of 2010 before performing in NYC and making their West Coast premier here in Portland.

Rude Mech‘s The Method Gun also premiered in the first half of 2010 and had been staged in at least six different venues before arriving at Portland’s Imago Theatre.

Rachid Ouramdane‘s World Fair is quite new, having premiered in May and touring France through July. Portland audience’s were the first outside France to see World Fair before it travels to a couple other cities in the USA and Canada and continues to tour Europe.

tEEth premiered Home Made here in Portland last November and received a killer cash prize presenting an excerpt of the work at Seattle’s On the Boards Theatre in January.

zoe | juniper‘s A Crack in Everything is even newer, having been performed only at its premier this past July at Jacob’s Pillow in Massachusetts.

I love that Mike Daisy was able to premier his audacious 24-hour monologue in Portland. I love how Kyle Abraham could hop on the mic after presenting his work-in-progress solo and invite audience feedback. I love that zoe | juniper were able to make their first foray into dance installation because PICA facilitated a residency at Washington High School over the summer leading up to TBA. Zoe said she couldn’t imagine it happening anywhere else.

PICA and Portland (because it always feels like half the town volunteers during the festival) have achieved so much to be proud of, and we all owe them much gratitude for their devotion, but the nights I was in attendance, the main-stage performances didn’t induce anyone to stomp/sneak out mid-show.

“Why not?” is a question worth considering.

Now for a fat copy and paste from Claudia La Rocco’s report on TBA:11 for the New York Times.

Still, Portland’s festival remains an outpost within the largely conservative landscape of performing arts presenters. Often what audiences see on these stages — especially the bigger ones — is more reflective of art from the past, with little attention paid to how artists currently approach and consider their traditions.

“That’s one of the biggest disappointments I have around the culture we live in, in the States,” said Philip Bither, senior curator for performing arts at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, one of the few major American institutions to throw its weight behind contemporary, interdisciplinary artistic practice. “That which is, to my mind, the norm of what our culture is producing now, that which is most relevant to our times, is viewed as fringe or oddball or just out of the mainstream. Internationally the keys to the big opera houses and major cultural institutions have been handed over years if not decades ago to contemporary artists. That’s not happened in the States, so it relegates those who are trying to support the work of our times to this odd, hard-to-describe, hard-to-understand, ghettoized thing.”

-Robert Tyree | September 2011 | Originally published on PICA’s TBA:11 Blog

epically quiet

Post-festival depression?

During the festival, I’m consumed and don’t have time to properly be. I sleep too little, drink too much, nub excessive smokes and feel robbed of my direction. My aptitudes swept away by a world running beneath my feet.

Sitting in a quiet room with two weeks’ artifacts: newsprints, programs, disorder and a laser machine.

I knew this before going in.

Bookending a thought Noelle opened with: a festival should leave you broken. That’ll be my way of saying spiritual.

The profanity of my habits and routines unbuttons during TBA.

I never know how to get back, but somehow it happens.

Photos from the top

©All Rights Reserved PICA PRESS CORE

Gia Goodrich 1,2,6

Wayne Bund 3,4,5,7

-Robert Tyree | September 2011 | Originally published through PICA’s PRESS CORE